Sociocultural environment as factor of student’s motivation establishment at the university

Abstract

This paper reports on a qualitative study of students’ sociocultural enviroment aimed at prompting student motivation in processes of scientific inquiry. In order to demonstrate how importamt is socio-cultrual enviroment we provide detailed analyses of students’ interaction processes. The analyses of student`s sociocultural enviroment deepen this finding and show that instead of participating inreflection activities, the students make use of these ‘copy and paste’ strategies and it is hard to cosider this as motivation. Further, the analyses indicate that the students’ employment of these strategies can be seen as a response to what can be termed the institutional practices of schooling embedded within the design of the prompts. These findings are discussed and explored in accordance with findings from previous studies on prompting students’ reflection in Web-based inquiry environments. The study demonstrates the value of a socio-cultural perspective for gaining a deeper understanding of students’ engagement with Web-based learning environments. Such a perspective can give valuable insight into how to (re)design prompts, and how prompts can be productive parts of students’ learning